Far to Seek eBook

discover it was Tara, after all. It would need
some courage to propose again. For the memory
of that juvenile fiasco still pricked his sensitive
pride. A touch of the Rajput came out there.
Letters from Serbia seemed to dawdle unconscionably
by the way. But, in leisurely course, he had
received an answer to his screed about Dyan and the
quest; a letter alive with all he loved best in her—­enthusiasm,
humour, vivid sympathy, deepened and enlarged by experiences
that could not yet be told. But Tara was far and
Miss Arden was near; and, in the mysterious workings
of sex magnetism, mere propinquity too often prevails.

And all the others seemed farther still. They
wrote regularly, affectionately. Yet their letters—­especially
his father’s—­seemed to tell precious
little of the things he really wanted to know.
Perhaps his own had been more reserved than he realised.
There had been so much at Jaipur and Delhi that he
could not very well enlarge upon. No use worrying
the dear old man; and she, who had linked them, unfailingly,
was now seldom mentioned between them.

So there grew up in Roy a disconsolate feeling that
none of them cared very much whether he came Home
or not. Jerry—­after three years in
a German prison—­was a nervous wreck; still
undergoing treatment; humanly lost, for the time being.
Tiny was absorbed in her husband and an even Tinier
baby, called Nevil Le Roy, after himself. Tara
was not yet home; but coming before long, because
Aunt Helen had broken down, between war work and the
shock of Atholl’s death.

A queer thing—­separation, mused Roy, as
Suraj slowed down to a walk and the glare of morning
flamed along the sky. There were they—­and
here was he: close relations, in effect; almost
strangers in fact. There was more between him
and them than several hundred miles of sea. There
was the bottomless gulf of the War; the gulf of his
bitter grief and the slow climb up from the depths
to Pisgah heights of revelation. Impossible to
communicate—­even had he willed—­those
inner, vital experiences at Chitor and Jaipur.
And he had certainly neither will nor power to enlarge
on his present turmoil of heart and mind.

Since his ride with Rose Arden, after the dinner-party,
things seemed to have taken a new turn. Their
relation was no longer tentative. She seemed
tacitly to regard him as her chosen cavalier; and he,
as tacitly, fell in with the arrangement. No
denying he felt flattered a little; subjugated increasingly
by a spell he could neither analyse nor resist, because
he had known nothing quite like it before. He
was, in truth, paying the penalty for those rare and
beautiful years of early manhood inspired by worship
of his mother. For every virtue, every gift, the
gods exact a price. And he was paying it now.
Deep down within him, something tugged against that
potent spell. Yet increasingly it prevailed and
lured him from his work. The vivid beings of his
brain were fading into bloodless unrealities; in which
state he could do nothing with them. Yet Broome’s
encouragement, and his father’s critical appreciation
of fragments lately sent Home, had fired him to fulfil—­more
than fulfil—­their expectations. And
now—­here he was tripped up again by his
all-too-human capacity for emotion—­as at
Jaipur.